Multi-line return from grep into an array?
 

I was playing with a bash script earlier, that cat'd a file and grep'd it for something like "A|B". This returned a multiple number of lines, so that the output from grep was

line A.1
line A.2
line B.1
line B.2
etc.
which obviously contains a new line after each line.

Right now I'm redirecting the result of the cat | grep to a file, and then cat | while read'ing that file in order to separately access each of the lines. There's *got* to be a way to do this without the external file..I just can't figure out how to somehow shoehorn the return of grep into a bash array or anything else iterate-able.

To let you know what I've tried:
- setting IFS to newline, but it seems that only cat pays attention to IFS...echo doesn't. And I can only cat a file, not a variable (that I've seen, anyway).
- I also gave piping the result to awk 'BEGIN {FS="
"} ...but there I got stuck, both because bash complains about that syntax and missing ending quotes and all that, but also because I've only seen that when followed immediately by {print $1 $2 $3} ..and I have no way of knowing how many lines will be returned.

Any pointers in the right direction would be appreciated!

Hope I got this correct. You have the result of something and you want get it line by line in a variable.
Instead of redirecting it to file try piping it to a while read loop.

First of all there's no need to .
Just it's quicker. piping always costs.

SO try something like The variable $a will get the input line by line

You should be able to use:
IFS="
"
for $line in `grep STRING FILE`;do
echo Line: $line
done